Soda Farl Sandwich

Take the round of soda dough that would otherwise go into the oven and cut it into four triangles, and you have farls. They cook flat on a dry griddle dusted with flour, no oil, fifteen minutes a side until the surface sets pale and the inside turns tender. What comes off the pan is a soft three-cornered piece with a floury face and a close, moist crumb, no hard caramelised crust anywhere on it. Split one through its thickness and the cut runs clean across that pale interior. The sandwich starts there, with a flat triangle that wants filling within the hour.

The same flour, soda, buttermilk and salt go into the soda loaf, and the difference is only that the loaf bakes in an oven while the farl griddles on a hot surface. That one fork in the method shows up in everything the farl then does. It comes off softer, flatter and shorter-keeping than its baked twin, pliable while warm and turning leathery within a day. So the farl is filled and eaten the morning it is made, often warmed again on the griddle before anything goes between the halves.

The leavening is chemistry rather than time. Baking soda meets the acid in the buttermilk and lifts the dough in the minutes it takes to mix, which is why a farl can be on the griddle almost as soon as the flour is wet. There is no proving, no kneading to develop gluten, none of the structure a yeast bread builds. The crumb that results has little spring to it, dense and close where a roll would be open and airy, and that flatness is exactly what the morning plate asks of it.

What goes between the halves comes off the same pan. Bacon renders its fat, and the cut face of the farl is laid down in it to fry, taking colour and salt and firming just enough to carry a wet filling without collapsing to paste. A fried egg follows, the yolk kept soft on purpose. The farl brings no fat of its own and the close crumb gives little back, so the running yolk does the work a buttered roll would otherwise do, slackening the dry interior from the inside while the bacon supplies the salt.

Held together this way it is a flat thing, not a stacked one. The farl sits as a carrier under bacon and egg rather than wrapping round them, and it is eaten hot off the griddle because there is no sturdy crust to hold it once it cools. Let it sit and the crumb stiffens and the appeal goes with it. Eaten warm, in the kitchen where it was cooked, the fried face and the soft inside and the yolk read as one mouthful. This is the filled soda of a Northern Irish breakfast, the fry-up turned into something you can pick up.

Origin

The word farl comes from the Scots fardel, a three-cornered cake taken as the fourth part of a round, and it names the shape rather than the recipe. Cut any griddle round into quarters and each wedge is a farl, which is why both the soda and the potato versions carry the name across Ulster. The bread itself belongs to the Scots and Ulster-Scots griddle tradition of the north of Ireland, where a hot iron plate over the fire did the baking that an oven did elsewhere, and where soft daily breads were turned out on it morning after morning rather than kept.

Soda bread spread through Ireland in the nineteenth century once bicarbonate of soda became a cheap household staple, giving cooks a way to raise bread fast with buttermilk and no yeast. In Ulster the dough went onto the griddle as farls as readily as into the oven as a loaf, and the griddled form settled into the region's cooked breakfast. The Ulster fry that grew up around it carries bacon, sausage, egg, black and white pudding and fried tomato, with two griddle breads on the plate: the soda farl and the potato farl, or fadge, the second of which is the piece that marks the meal off from the cooked breakfasts further south.

From a plate of those parts to a sandwich is a short move, and a habitual one. The filled soda takes the bacon and egg already cooking on the same surface and folds them into a split, fried farl, so a sit-down fry-up becomes something carried out the door or eaten standing at the stove. It travels under other names around the province, the soda sandwich or the breakfast soda, but the idea holds: the griddle bread that was meant to be eaten warm gets pressed into service as the wrapper for the rest of the morning. It stays a Northern Irish thing, made fresh each day, eaten the same day, and built on the one fact that the bread was griddled rather than baked.